Pages

Tags

.hack// series (14) .hack//Infection (6) .hack//mutation (6) .hack//outbreak (7) .hack//quarantine (5) 1bitHeart (4) A Mortician's Tale (1) Ability Up (11) About Love Hate and the Other Ones (1) Achievements (4) Ahriman's Prophecy (1) Aladdin (1) Alice Elliot (6) Alicemare (1) Alphadia Genesis (5) Amnesia: Memories (1) An Octave Higher (2) Analogue: A Hate Story (1) Anodyne (4) Artefact (2) Artefact Adventure (1) Aveyond (2) BAD END (2) Bad Service (1) Best Armour (16) Best Weapons (26) Bestiary (1) Beyd (1) Bioshock Infinite (1) Black Home (1) Blitzball (1) Blush Blush (1) Boss Fight (1) Boyfriend Dungeon (1) Boyfriend Maker/Boyfriend Plus (1) Braid (8) Breath of Fire (24) Breath of Fire II (18) Breath of Fire III (37) Breath of Fire IV (25) Breath of Fire Series (10) Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter (4) Brothers (1) Casper (1) Cave Story (1) Celestian Tales: Old North (2) Cheat Engine (1) Cheats (1) Cinderella Phenomenon (3) Coffee Talk (1) Collectibles (11) competition (1) Completion Project (21) Confines of the Crown (1) Cozy Grove (1) crafts (1) Crash Bandicoot 2 (2) Croc: Legend of the Gobbos (2) Crush Crush (1) Crystal Story (2) Crystalline (1) Cubicle Quest (1) Dark Parables (5) Death Stranding (1) Deis (2) Deponia (1) Dèsirè (2) Dice (1) Discworld (1) Disgaea (1) Dreamworld (1) eBay (1) Ehrgeiz (3) Epic Battle Fantasy III (1) Equipment (3) eReader (1) Eternal Senia (1) Fairy Village (1) Fanfiction (8) Final Fantasy (4) Final Fantasy II (2) Final Fantasy IV (3) Final Fantasy IX (7) Final Fantasy Series (5) Final Fantasy Tactics (1) Final Fantasy V (1) Final Fantasy VII (7) Final Fantasy VIII (10) Final Fantasy X (7) Final Fantasy X-2 (4) Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles (3) Fishing (11) Forget Me Not My Organic Garden (1) Freeware (8) Frontierville (1) Future Learn (1) Game (1) Game-Design (1) Giving Up (1) God Only Knows (1) Gone Home (1) Grunty (1) Guide (92) GymPact (1) Habitica (3) HabitRPG (3) Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1) Hex Manipulation (1) Hitman GO (1) Horizon Zero Dawn (2) HuniePop (1) I Love You Colonel Sanders! (1) Idle Evolution (2) incentive (4) Incomplete (7) Interpretation (11) iOS (1) IRL (4) Justice for All (1) Kobo (2) Kongregate (1) Koudelka (2) Labyrinthine Dreams (1) Lake of Voices (1) Later Alligator (1) Legacy Challenge (53) Level Grinding (3) Liar (1) Little Goody Two Shoes (1) Littlewood (1) Long Live the Queen (2) Lord of Twilight (1) Lost Phone Series (1) Manillo (2) Marie's Room (1) Masters (9) Memento (1) Mini-Game (5) missed messages (1) Mobile (1) Monster Camp (1) Monster Magic (3) Monster Prom (4) Murder by Numbers (1) My Time at Portia (1) Nina Wyndia (2) Nintendo DS (1) non-gaming (3) Notes (20) Octopath Traveler (2) Official Guides (1) Online Courses (1) Pacman World (1) Pact (1) Paradise Killer (2) PC Building (1) Persona 4 (4) Pheonix Wright Ace Attorney (1) Phoenix Wright (7) Pikmin Bloom (1) Plague Inc (1) Playing All My Steam Games (5) Pokemon (1) Princess Maker 2 (4) Princess Maker Series (3) Programming (1) Project Zero (2) PSYCHO-PASS Mandatory Happiness (3) Quick Overview (2) Rant (2) Rebuild (1) Recettear (1) Review (14) Science Girls! (1) sewing (1) Shadow Hearts (3) Shadow Hearts Series (8) Shadow Hearts: Covenant (17) Shadows and Lies (1) Shopping List (5) Sidequest (12) Sims 3 (53) Skyrim (1) Solomon's Club (1) Speed Dating for Ghosts (1) Speed Run (1) Spiderman (2) Spring of Myst (1) Spyro (2) Star Ocean: Til the End of Time (2) Stardew Valley (1) Stat-Raising (6) Steam (2) Stories Untold (1) Storyline (7) Street Fighter (1) Super Mario World (1) Tailor Tales (1) Tales of Symphonia (2) Tarkov (3) Tarzan (1) The 11th Hour (1) The 13th Doll (1) The 39 Steps (1) The 7th Guest (1) The Banner Saga (5) The Crooked Man (2) The King's Request (1) The Novelist (1) The Path (1) The Quiet Man (1) The Sacred Tears TRUE (1) The Sexy Brutale (2) The Sims (54) The Suicide of Rachel Foster (2) the white chamber (1) The Yawhg (1) Theory (1) Thunderhawk (3) Tigger's Honey Hunt (1) Tips (1) To Be or Not to Be (1) Trivia (21) Turing Test (1) Unlimited Cash (4) Vandal Hearts II (4) Visual Novel (1) Walking Over Alice's Grave (4) Women in Games (3) Work-in-Progress (4) X-Men: Mutant Academy 2 (1) Xenosaga (1) Yuna (3) Yuri Hyuga (8) Zero Escape (2) Zodiac Challenge (53)

Thursday 13 February 2014

Paralells Between Shadow Hearts and Final Fantasy X/X-2

In playing the Shadow Hearts series and Final Fantasy X and X-2 I've noticed a number of parallels.

Warning; Spoilers for SH and FFX/X-2 From Here On In

Shadow Hearts focuses on Yuri and Alice.  It begins when Yuri saves Alice from Albert, and continues with their journey together.  Yuri is tormented by the fusion monsters inside him, and Alice bargains with them to rescue his soul.  In the bad ending, which is canonical, Alice dies and Yuri lives because of this deal.  In this canonical ending, Yuri doesn't know that Alice is going to die until it happens.

Final Fantasy X focuses on Yuna and Tidus' journey.  Yuna is attempting to attain the final summon, which will kill her.  Everyone but Tidus is aware of this.  Once he does find out, he vows to find a way to prevent it, which he does, sacrificing himself.  Final Fantasy X does not have any alternative endings.

The parallels here are obvious.  Both Yuna and Yuri would have died without Tidus' and Alice's interventions.

Shadow Hearts II and Final Fantasy X-2 focus on Yuri and Yuna coming to terms with the death of Tidus and Alice.  Shadow Hearts II focuses more on Karin and her feelings for Yuri, so his feelings are purposefully obscured, for the purposes of fucking with us.  However, what we do see of Yuri involves him not getting over her death.  Of course, she's been dead for less than six months, if I recall correctly.  Furthermore, Alice's ghost lives deep inside his mind, like his father did in the first game.  That makes sense - that's where her grave appeared once she'd made the original pact.  This is most likely not helping him to recover, at all.

Yuri himself has been cursed, yet again.  This time, his soul is going to dissolve, leaving him an empty shell with no memories. That on top of everything else gives him a reason to cling to Alice's memory even more.

In the good ending of Shadow Hearts II, Yuri evades the mistletoe curse by dying.  His soul goes back in time, to the start of the first game, with the implication that the good ending becomes canonical the second time around.  This is confirmed in the third game, when Roger Bacon claims he's never performed the Emigre ritual before.  If that's the case, then this Roger Bacon cannot have lived through the events of Shadow Hearts II, indicating that, in this timeline, they never happened.

Anyway; Yuri's journey in Shadow Hearts II can be described as him striving to keep Alice.  In the first game, he told us he'd rather die than live without his soul.  This game is him coming to terms with the fact that that is his choice; he can lose Alice and his soul, or he can die.

Final Fantasy X-2 has a number of endings.  The two best endings involve Yuna reuniting with Tidus.  The mechanism for this is not her dying, but rather his being brought back to life.

Yuna's journey is entirely focused on searching for Tidus.  In the other endings she longs for him still, despite building a new life without him.  In one notable ending, she can choose not to revive him, despite attaining the ability to.

Looking for parallels, we can see that in both sequels, the pairs are reunited.  In Shadow Hearts, it's by Yuri dying.  In Final Fantasy it's through Tidus being brought back to life.

It is worth noting that both games included mechanisms by which Tidus and Alice could be revived.  The entire Shadow Hearts series is built around the Emigre maniscript, a document which explicitly explains how to revive the dead.  We later see it work successfully, in Shadow Hearts 3

Tidus was a creation of the fayth the entire time; he was never real in the way that the rest of his world was.  However, the entire mechanism for his imagining was destroyed during Final Fantasy X, which is why he disappeared in the first place.

In short, you could find a lot more justification for Alice being revived than for Tidus.  So why did Yuri die while Tidus lived?

 I feel that the reason for this difference, and the contrast, is because Shadow Hearts  is darker and edgier, and more realistic.  Although it has fantastical elements, it is more firmly rooted in reality.  The first world war is a major plot point, and real world people and locations are used.  In that world, Alice couldn't come back to life.  Her death was real, it meant something.  She couldn't be revived for the same reason Aeris couldn't be revived; because her death was real to the players, and it hurts too much when fictitious deaths that feel real are revoked.  It highlights how it can't happen in real life.

In Yuna's world, Tidus could be revived.  X-2 was happier and lighter than the first game, while, in contrast, Shadow Hearts II was often darker than the original - see Yuri brutally beating the politician who'd caused the deaths of both his parents for example.  I feel that X-2 departed further from reality to the point where we could accept Tidus' revival.  It felt like it made more sense within the plot and the tone of the story.

No comments:

Post a Comment